Standing up for Nature
I sent this to NE this morning; The ICO guidance to public bodies on Time Limits for Compliance states that bodies such as NE should be able ‘account for, and justify, the length of time taken to meet the obligation’ when the ‘authority complies close to, or on, the final day of the 20 working…
Here is a response from NE to an information request from myself to follow up an earlier one. We discover not very much in the first answer, and that the MoU has not been renewed a year after it expired from the second answer. This is another example of an information request, a pretty straight…
This image, from a walker, shows moorland burning a few days ago on Forest of Bowland grouse moors. This burn was on the slopes of Conder Head. Now, the Duke of Westminster’s Abbeystead Estate has signed up to the voluntary agreement not to burn blanket bog – so was this a transgression? According to this…
Not a great deal of MP action this week. I had a letter from my own MP (dated 23 October) in response to my email to him (8 October) saying that ‘In order to ensure that Ministers are aware of your concerns and to provide you with an official and fully informed response’ … ‘I…
Last Sunday some friends in The Netherlands had their own Walk for Wildlife – and they had better weather than we did! Here is the message that Chris Packham sent them in advance. And a link to an account of the walk – in English (and for our Dutch readers here, here) It looks good…
Here is a link to the booking form but I’m not sure whether there are any places left… It looks like a good event and I might even see some birds on the trip.
Burned Sphagnum photographed yesterday on Midhope Moors, Peak District. And here is Midhope Moors with the blanket bog shaded in buff from the Defra MAGIC system https://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx And some more burned Sphagnum up there in the blanket bog. Well, this looks to me like a recent burn. I understand that Wakefield Farms are the landowners…
Do you recall that over a year ago a PhD position was advertised at the University of Northampton, just down the road from me, on the social impact of driven game shooting. At the time I wrote this. Yesterday I went to a seminar on the first year of the study and heard how the…
This was the example of moorland burning I saw on the northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park three weeks ago. Does this comply with the voluntary agreement made by many grouse moors not to burn on blanket bogs? There are a couple of things that I would need to know before I could…
Sometimes I wonder what has happened to erstwhile frequent commenters on this blog who seem to have gone missing. Giles Bradshaw has commented many times on this blog – usually under his own name but I’ve caught him trying to have conversations with himself under aliases too. Giles’s comments go back to August 2011 and…